This project is conceived as an initial step in the development of efficacious aural rehabilitation strategies for individuals with adult-onset hearing impairment. As a result of this impairment individuals experience difficulty communicating, thus there are known reductions on self-perceived hearing-related quality of life. While communication performance and hearing- related quality of life improvements can be obtained through the use of hearing aids, their use is not a panacea. Aural rehabilitation therapy is designed to help individuals for whom hearing aid use alone is not sufficient to overcome the communicative, social, and psychological impact of adult-onset hearing impairment. Thus the goals of aural rehabilitation therapy are twofold: 1) alleviate the communication difficulties (i.e., the hearing disability); and, 2) reduce the psycho-social sequelae (i.e., the hearing handicap) that often accompany the impairment. While aural rehabilitation approaches evaluated to date appear efficacious when group performance is examined, individual subject variability is found in response to treatment. This suggests the need to examine how factors that may be amenable to treatment are related to hearing disability and/or hearing handicap. Training on factors which contribute significantly to hearing disability and/or hearing handicap would warrant further investigation. Thus the present study is designed to examine the relationship between one cognitive- linguistic variable that may be amenable to treatment, and the self-perception of hearing disability and/or hearing handicap. This is the ability to use linguistic constraints in the speech recognition process. To examine, in the main experiment, the unique contribution of this factor to hearing disability and/or hearing handicap, the regression model will also include data on known significant audiometric and demographic correlates, as well as data on self-perceived benefit from the use of hearing aids. Prior to initiating the main experiment, however, it is necessary to examine an underlying assumption of the mathematical model, based on probability theory, that will be used to quantify linguistic constraint use. Results will not only have important clinical implications, but will also increase our understanding of the use of probability theory as a model for the speech recognition process.